What I teach

It‘s not about phenomena, including emotions, psychology and ‘head-knowledge’. It is about the actual noticing of the non-separation of all phenomena, as they are manifested by the Divine. And it is about the knowledge of the Ultimate, or Absolute, the foundational aspect of the all-creating Trinity.

The Noticing and the Knowing are both beyond psychology, beyond learnt knowledge, beyond even rational thought.

The path to Noticing which I teach uses exercises to remove one by one the limiting factors to your perception, which have been imposed by cultural convention. You will personally experience that separation is an illusion. Some people are more gifted at this than others, yet all of us can extend our perception through such exercises. A well-known term for this is ‘ESP’, Extra-Sensory Perception, which sums it up accurately. In terms of being able to perceive more, the fact is, we all have ESP ‘eyes’ to perceive beyond the conventional senses; yet most people (a) do not know this, and (b) have their eyelids closed, therefore ‘see’ nothing (at least, not consciously). So you don’t have to do the impossible, you are already equipped with ‘eyes’, you only need to learn how to open them. For more on this see my book article ‘Awareness – Small and Large’.

You will probably only come to this personal experience if you actually do (a lot of) exercises. DTFE – Do The F***ing Exercises  In this context, this is what I wrote to a dear friend in Ghana, Africa:

The ‘knowledge’ we gain from cultural influences, and also from so-called ‘teachers’ (like me ha-ha), is what I call parrot-knowledge. We repeat things that we heard, like a parrot saying “who’s a pretty boy” but not really understanding what it is voicing. Another good English word for this is ‘hearsay’.

So when I talk about coming to know the fact of the Divine, and the Ultimate beyond that, I mean through personal experience. That is the only way we can really know something, all else is just belief or hearsay, for which we have no proof. For example. someone may tell you that all people in Togo are bloodthirsty madmen. You can either (1) believe this; or (2) take the stance that you don’t know because you have not been there; or (3) you can go there, meet a lot of people, and find out for yourself. Number 1 is for me not acceptable; number 2 is at least honest; but number 3 is the real thing – then you will have definite knowledge of how the people there really are.

And believe it or not, (please do not), you can train your Noticing by doing many exercises over a long period of time, which are designed to assist the expansion of your perception. Then you will know from your own experience how non-separate, how related and interconnected, all of existence is, because you will experience many aspects of this a large number of times. Thus you come to knowledge.

The path to Knowing builds on the Noticing. It includes rational thought, deduction – but only as a means, not an end. Because once an apparent individual has arrived at the goal of that deduction, it is thought no longer, but has become unshakable Knowledge.

As the Buddha said, ‘Gold is tested by rubbing, so study my teachings, and don’t believe in me except by testing. Just as a goldsmith tests a piece of gold by rubbing, burning, and so on, you should examine my teaching and see if it is logical and also make experiments with it and see if it is beneficial. If so accept it.’ Dalai Lama